To my knowledge, Wang is not a blogger. But Yahoo is the same company that rushed to the “aid” of the Chinese government to secure a long prison term for another journalist, Shi Tao, who was a blogger.

Second, here’s an email I got from Amr Gharbeia in Egypt, in its entirety.

Greetings

I am getting confirmations that there is a lawsuit against the government to block twenty-one websites and blogs, including my own.

The lawsuit is started by Abdelfattah Mourad, one of Egypt’s most senior judges–and head of the Alexandria Appeal Court, where imprisoned blogger AbdolKareem Nabil Soliman’s case is heard next week. The judge is a self-claimed authority in internet issues. I was excited by the fact that he started a blog a while ago, and wrote him asking if he would mind me writing a review for a book he published recently on “the scientific and legal foundations of blogs”. He did not mind, until I published the thing. He obviously has copied tens of pages from the recent report by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information on Internet freedoms in the Arab world. I noticed this only because some of the figures and estimations were taken from an interview with me. He did this without citation, except for one link to Initiative for an Open Arab Internet in the endnotes, while putting footnotes to other books he wrote on text that he has not written.

Three things prove it is not a mistake: 1) he copied at least two other bloggers with no referencing at all; 2) he changed parts in the text copied from the report to mean the opposite, for example to indicate that Tunisia is a nice, liberal and progressive country; and 3) he published at the front and back pages of his book several warnings against plagiarism, and referred to laws, religions and scientific research methods. He does not allow anyone to cite anything more than two lines from his writings, and in the book he warns against bloggers who violate copyrights, associates them with international terrorism and other things, and claims he has written a reference onscientific methodology. To top it all, he annexes ready-to-fill complaint forms against bloggers who publish pornography (fitting someone’s head over a naked body, an imaginary case with no history in Egypt’s blogs) and publicizing news that could tarnish the country’s reputation.

I do not really care much for copy rights, and think they are over-rated and keep knowledge, medicine, and soon genetically-engineered food from the world’s poorest, and I would not have written anything if this was another blogger, or a journalist, or even a university professor. What worries me, however, is that this is a judge whose ruling cannot be appealed. He can silence, imprison or execute people, and he oversees our elections.

Once the blogs are found offensive by the court, then in light of the Egyptian’s regime reputation, it is automatic to prosecute the bloggers. This is an early warning. We are still gathering information, and HRInfo should be making a release and starting procedure Saturday next. Hossam elHamalawy is posting in English. Follow him for updates.